Numerous cool ticks here. Cow Parade Cow are from Australia. Tick. The song packs in loads of stuff. Tick. Its quirky. Tick. NME.com got there first, meh.
The Road Is Beautiful Again is off their Big Sky album which is available as a name-your-price affair on bandcamp.
There are a number of reasons this song grabbed my attention – yes OK the video – two girls, erm, enjoying/exploring life might have been one of them but the song itself is quite good too. I suppose lyrically its quite simple, that assessment based on the fact it contains twelve la’s in succession – never a bad thing. Riff/composition wise though its sufficiently complex to engage the brains musocortex (I believe its somewhere near the hippocampus). On the subject of brains did you know we all come equipped with a “Paleocortex” – I guess that explains my childhood fascination with dinosaurs.
Today Spotify launched its new embeddable play button which allows websites / blogs etc. to play tracks via Spotify without the user having to leave the webpage. For many sites this is a handy way to get around music licensing issues and solves the problem of license holders issuing them take-down notices.
It’s a smart move for the platform that has ambitions of becoming the ‘operating system’ for music. But its a crowded market. There are three platforms that I regularly come across in my weekly on-line music consumption, YouTube – arguably the most widely used platform for embedding music, SoundCloud – frequently the chosen platform for new artists self publishing and music PR’s and Vimeo – generally the place for new bands that have a nicely directed arty video to show off.
Spotify have done amazingly well to line up a big list of supporters: The Guardian, Huffington Post, The Independent, Mashable, NME, Noisey.com, Pitchfork, Popdust and Rolling Stone to name a few. That’s a lot of support for a platform that has relatively low cut through.
Whilst Spotify has had lots of press and is seen in the tech community as being very cool its quoted as having only 10m active users. That may or may not be accurate but its small especially as the platform is now in 13 countries, the UK and USA among them.
The launch partners will have different reasons for backing and if nothing else its some free PR around something that is seen as cool. However I don’t see this as being an automatic substitute for the established methods of integrating music. YouTube for example has vast catalogue of music, it pays PRS/PPL royalties and provides a virtually barrier free way to consume music on a webpage and in many cases it has moving pictures to keep the user entertained. SoundCloud doesn’t have the video but provides a band friendly way to control and promote their music. Yes they suffer the odd take-down notice from angry music executives, particularly YouTube, but music blogging is transient you rarely go in search of yesterdays blog post so largely this is a non-issue. For other sites that want to use music to add something extra to their offering Spotify could be useful but you still have that barrier to entry which you have to weigh against the odd broken link.
I’m not bashing Spotify, I too like many people love Spotify it is a great way to consume music. I think the play button is good, and could be very useful addition to the music blogger/web developer’s toolkit. I’m just not convinced a ‘play’ button, albeit a very nice one with some extra bells a whistles warrants the silver bullet image its being heralded as.
I make no secret of the fact that my musical tastes are quite simple. Catchy and upbeat (you might say poppy/commercially appealing yada yada) are the two prerequisites for most songs to feature here. There hasn’t been an awful lot of that recently at least not that’s caught my attention. So pleased to say I’ve found one. Crocodiles new track ‘Sunday’ is great, and released with plenty of time to be picked up on summer playlists. Check out the video below.
Sill Flyin’ new single “Travelin’ Man” was released on the 26th of March, so its out already you can buy it here, its on Highline Records. And its great.(I’m not one for highbrow music reviewing)
There is definitely a shortage of drinking/shanty songs in the charts, so I applaud The Futureheads for reviving this near forgotten art form.
A bit of googling reveals this song was written by Harry Wincott, a songwriter from ye olde 1867!
Dalaplan are a rather good, and fun, Swedish rock band. According to the Swedish Wikipedia, their name Dalaplan is from some sort of traffic junction in central Malmö (Sweden’s 3rd largest city).
So in English that roughly translates into ‘Spaghetti Junction’. Quite the picture postcard destination by all accounts:
The song ‘Feber’ translates more directly into ‘Fever’. They have a load of songs on their Soundcloud page, but as always if you like them then part with some cash and buy their stuff. This particular track can be downloaded from Soundcloud, hit the download button below.
On DIPLO’s Mad Decent label, Bosco Delrey are from across the pond and another band I probably should have heard of by now – especially as their MySpace profile was created in 2005. I don’t think they are any relation to Lana of a similar sounding second name – if you were wondering. Not entirely sure where to begin in describing them musically so I’ll hand you over to Last FM’s biography page that describes it as:
“bedroom soul hooks and dancehall reggae basslines anchored down by solid songwriting and lyrics”
Yeah. Couldn’t have put it better 
. Anyway have a listen, I think they are rather brilliant, this track ‘Lovely Sleepy Dead’ is off the Everybody Wah album. You can grab it off Amazon, there is only one copy left, but sure you can get it elsewhere. They are on Facebook too.
Another great track off the same album – “Baby’s got a blue flame”
Not entirely sure how I’ve gone so long without knowing about this band, their track ‘WOR’ from way way way back in April 2010 is genius. Their latest track I just heard on that fine vessel of popular music, Radio 1. To launch their self titled new album they are doing an in store at Rough Trade East on the 1st of Feb, its a wristband affair so get there early.
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